In the Cards
by Elyan White
Summary: Sometimes, Kanda doesn't know if he has cheated death or if death is cheating him. Introspection from the undying, and an imperfect resolution for an imperfect man.


**Warning for abstract.**

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The third week of July was a week of both beginnings and endings for Kanda Yuu. For it was during the third week of July that Kanda came to know, very suddenly and with a curious clarity, the exact day that he would die.

It was summer at the Order, which is to say that it was never summer at the Order-the moody sky around the island stayed moody as ever and easily provoked, prone to humid rains, uneasy seas, and a constant pall of gray sun-and, in the recent wake of his revelation, an ambivalent, empathic mirror to Kanda himself.

 _One petal left._

The morning spilled onto Kanda's bedsheets from the window, ugly and damp; dull blues, stifled neutrals, and moments of glaring white reflected back at him his own jaded futility-his frustrated revulsion, his tragic inevitability, and his underlying sense of exhausted relief.

There were more things in him which raged and murmured with the rest, but those were the unfamiliar things he wasn't used to naming, and the conflicted things which came and went and replaced each other as the days passed towards the day of significance.

Kanda mechanically dressed in black and mechanically made up his white sheets, reflecting to himself that despite their contrast they might in the end just both be shades of gray. Gray, gray, and more gray-but soon the gray would be over.

Kanda had seen it-his death was a painted day, full of idylls and picturesques, and as blue as the first time he remembered ever seeing the sky. When it first appeared in his dreams, Kanda had thought it was one of Tiedoll's acrylic landscapes brought to life by his subconscious. But he had continued, in a fevered sort of way, to dream of the day-what it would look like, what noises could be recognized from the background sound, what smells would be in the air.

At first it had been flashes, brief incomprehensibilities which he had neither been able to seize or relate to each other, but the puzzle he hadn't known he was putting together had at an indiscernible moment become a picture, undeniable and sharply vivid. At first, in fact, Kanda hadn't even been able to remember it awake-he had only found himself blundering into consciousness in his bed with his face turned on instinct to the only corner of his room with light: the corner where the lotus shed its colorless, preternatural glow.

Kanda had figured out in short order that it was the lotus which controlled his dreams. The lotus controlled everything.

Except there was no lotus anymore, just a single peel of its white-pink flesh, drifting and unconnected. It had been this way since July had begun, and incidentally, so had Kanda.

The day drew closer all the time-since the dream reoccurred in new details every night, he knew it did. Kanda did not try to make it come quicker or slower because he did not know which he preferred. Instead, he lost himself in mundane tasks, day after day. Pulling on his boots, and it was closer, clicking his bedroom door shut behind him, and it was closer, passing someone in the hall, and it was closer.

Kanda did not know _when_ that day was, in the sense of its relation to the time he called "present". It was simply that he had, one day, in the midst of his perfectly usual motions, simply _known_ it-that he had dreamed of being in a place surrounded by white and that the white meant death. He knew it would come in the summer and the wind would taste of Mediterranean sea-salt and rising bread when it did.

He had been at the tail-end of some miscellaneous mission when he came to know it, with two weeks of travel and five different hotels on his skin, and the revelation was so quick and tangible that Kanda had stopped in his tracks without meaning to when it appeared in his mind. He been utterly disoriented when his next blink brought back the blackish industry and the smoky town he was surrounded by.

One of the people he supposed was a friend had seen his pause and asked him about it in concern, but Kanda did not remember who it was and he had not accepted the concern in any case. He'd taken since then to avoiding those people and their concern, more than usual-Kanda was not sure he could disguise what he knew from all of them, and it was tiresome to be asked questions he didn't want to answer.

By now, Kanda didn't hesitate when he thought of it. Instead, his existence became one continuous hesitation, and a detached lethargy dragged at his limbs all the time. He was still fast, still strong, still aggressive and vital, but just…a little behind.

When he came into the Chief's office, there was no slamming door to herald his presence. He simply let himself in, let it fall shut, and stepped over the paperwork to wait in patient, neutral silence.

The Chief looked up from his work and he studied him strangely through his glasses, as though he somehow hadn't expected Kanda even though he had asked for him. Kanda had become used to that this summer-the Chief knew as well as Kanda did that all was not the same as it had been, but he did not know that there was no lotus. Or maybe he did, and just did not want to ask about it. Kanda didn't want to care either way, and so didn't.

The Chief tiredly relented in his scrutiny when Kanda revealed nothing, and Kanda looked down in placid curiosity at the folder he was handed. He had another mission-he couldn't help but wonder if this would be the one. He flipped through the folder-dark deaths, black dust, scattered ashes. Ah, but blue sea and a town of sculpture-Kanda closed his eyes and smelled yeast and sun for a moment.

The Chief's eyes frowned at him in wariness. Maybe he had said something to Kanda-maybe he thought he was acting strangely. Well, people only tried to act in routine if they intended to carry that routine on, didn't they-there really wasn't much point when one planned to stop carrying on entirely.

Kanda walked out of the office rubbing his fingers together, feeling a texture of salt and dry clay between them and something caught in the back of his throat that he thought might be a lotus petal. His words had died a while ago, or at least his little interest in saying them, so he wound silently though the halls and high corridors he had known since childhood-for twelve petals, he had known them. Yet even though he might never see them again, Kanda wasn't interested in them, either. Nothing was interesting, lately.

The eyes of the Order found _Kanda_ interesting, he knew. They thought he was strange just like the Chief did. He felt them pass over him as he went to the canals-they felt like humid sun might feel passing over him and he became one more degree removed from the Earth.

When reality sharpened again, his back was to the pillar that marked the waiting spot for his ferry out of the Order, and Kanda thought to check the folder in his hand. He was both idle and restless, but not really bored-reading gave him something to do, even if he'd lost the ability to quite grasp the relevance of it.

He wouldn't be taking the mission alone, he saw-there was another Exorcist to be going with him. The Chief had said the name, but names had started to die for Kanda, along with his words and his temper. Perhaps, then, this was another mission Kanda would be coming home from after all-he did not remember company in any dream.

With a still, sated patience that was uncharacteristic of him, still and imagining he was becoming a part of the building or the walls or of something else large and unfeeling, Kanda waited. It was the Bookman Junior who came jogging up to him, spouting colorful greeting and half-sincere apologies-he'd made himself late saying all his goodbyes.

Kanda wondered if he should have done the same.

There was a call down the canal for the Exorcists, and the slim ferry came cutting through the water, manned by the Finder. When the long oar scraped it to a stop beside them, Kanda stepped onto the boat as weightlessly as a dream (or at least, he probably did-he might just as well have drifted aboard like a ghost), and then his partner sprang limberly behind him so that dark ripples went out through the water, throwing lights into the shadows around and above. His voice yammered into his ear like the crying of gulls and the wood underneath creaked with water and salt, and when Kanda closed his eyes he could still hear it and smell it and see the lights so that illusion surrounded him.

The world rocked and bumped and gave way to the sea, and Kanda was still behind his eyes as the ferryman rowed them off down the Styx.

When he opened them again, they were rail-bound. There were new memory-images in his mind- _black flowers, white-breast birds_. It had not been on the way here that Kanda had seen them. Had he been dreaming awake? He blinked to refresh his sight, but the images stayed in his eyes- _blackflowers_ closed _whitebreast_ open. The train's rapid momentum rolled like a pendulum, through his head and heart, and Kanda let his head move with clockwork impulse to the window.

All he could see were hills, and he didn't care what was on the other side of any them. He didn't care, didn't care, didn't care. Didn't care that he didn't care. Maybe if he closed his eyes again he'd die right here.

He was looking through the window, yes, into the lives they were passing, but no one was seeing him.

The fledgling Bookman kept sending him looks in the meantime, which Kanda meant to acknowledge but somehow couldn't bring himself to. He felt the potential contained in his bones for the turn of the head and the shift of the posture, but it stayed crackling in his marrow with nowhere to go. It was as though this body was no longer Kanda's.

The Bookman Junior asked him at one point if there was something he'd been wanting to say-if there was something for some reason he was leaving unsaid between them. A nervous strain could be heard under his joking tone that he himself probably wasn't aware of. Kanda wouldn't be surprised-Exorcists and Bookmen alike could both sense death when it was coming, for they lived so constantly on the fringes of life, and most of them did, in Kanda's experience, do it without knowing.

There was only one exception-the Chief's sister had told him once of a dream in which the Order was broken into arcane rubble and the sea rose with the blood of the soldiers to slowly swallow it. The persisting black-moon circles under her eyes showed that she dreamt it still, and Kanda believed that it would come true but did not feel pressed to stay-the Order would survive as long as there was someone left to dance in their ashes.

The question started to die, and Kanda gazed indifferently into the window beside him still, letting the passage of blue mountains outside and the thunder beneath their feet answer it. The sky changed, but never moved. Kanda wanted to become the sky-to become sky. Sky like in the dreams.

In the dreams there were eyes, too (which were not really dreams but truth, as he knew), eyes like in the Order. It had seemed somehow so natural, the warmth and the yeast and the powder-blue, that all of the eyes had not bothered him there.

Come to think of it, all of this seemed natural to Kanda, and spiraling in his lost mind like a leaf broken from its tree was the vague concept that it should frighten him-that whatever was happening to not just his body but to his soul and his identity, was terribly, terribly wrong.

But no, no, of course it shouldn't. Lotuses bloomed, before they slept. Lotuses had to sleep eventually. A glass had been tipped from the shelf and it was falling and Kanda was waiting for it to shatter because that was how Kanda had been born and lived and would die.

All he could do was wait- _couldn't see the floor, couldn't see the floor, couldn't see the floor_ , the dreams didn't say when the glass would hit it. Today or tomorrow or any today or tomorrow until the summer was through.

(Secretly, the floor was close. The dreams were bleeding too close for it to be far.)

Kanda didn't think of it until later, but he hadn't packed his suitcase for a return trip.

The train pulled into its station, and Kanda went through the motions, his head heavy with all of his thoughts. How many times had he stepped off trains as an Exorcist? How many times had he slung luggage, elbowed through aisles, minded his step and the hem of his coat? Today it all felt alien.

Kanda kept his focus on the nationality-defying red burst of his partner's hair-the Bookmen both blended in and stood out in every crowd Kanda had ever seen them in, and Kanda had learned over and over to spot either in any. But his conscious mind trailed behind him, still softly trying to grasp at the fading familiarity behind him-at what was missing, what he couldn't find anymore, what he couldn't look back at.

Kanda had lost something on his way-something that had let him believe his future was uncertain. He had thought it was the hopeful insistence of those stubborn friends who so often refused to believe lost causes existed-that white-haired one in particular. But it seemed perhaps that it had been Kanda's all along, and that his denial of it had made him see it in everyone but himself.

That, Kanda thought with a ghost of what could have been remorse, was something that he wouldn't have liked to lose if he'd known it was a part of him.

Kanda fancied that the petals had gone faster on the more recent missions-Innocence and Akuma both evolved and got stronger, but Kanda's curse could not. Or maybe that was just the nature of time-nine petals, at the age he'd been when he had them, had seemed like a lot.

It was only as the petals started falling that is time began to felt stunted-stifled, too short, enclosing and capturing. That last petal was the lure and draw, Kanda's sense of urgency on some days and his sense of choiceless desolation on others. The last petal demanded he die, the last petal demanded he lived. Though perhaps it did not _demand_ -Kanda could refuse a demand, could frustrate the one who had made it; could spite and disobey. But the lotus-no such agency.

Death Kanda usually equated with foul blackness and dusty fire and air he couldn't breathe, because those were the things he associated with the battlefield. That was what his own deaths so far had been-hellish struggle and slow surrender.

But Kanda was also used to equating death with impermanence-for him, a fall he'd get up from, for another soldier, a life they stopped living. He supposed it was fitting that his final death was the one death he'd never suffered-one which did not involve violence or carnage or an outside force he could call "enemy". Kanda called many things "enemy", in life, and wondered often which would kill him.

He guessed he should have known, though-no enemy had ever held power over him the way the lotus did.

Somewhere in his foggy musings (foggy, why was he so foggy all the time?), the faceless station clamor had passed him by along with a fair bit of distance. Kanda blinked around, caught half-submerged in death-thoughts. White-breasted birds darted in front of his eyes, skipping one and two and four shadows over his upturned face, and past them Kanda recognized the city from the pictures in the mission portfolio (the city from sleeping).

The sky was so bright it was a blinding ache in his head, and white sun dazzled off the sides of rough-edged buildings. Still wind sat coolly in the streets, blown in from the coast and trapped in the valley, and low, musical babbling snatched in and out of earshot from the pigeons and the lovebirds. The streets Kanda and the Bookman Junior followed were sanded down by nature and warm underfoot, and heat rose in front of them like gauze hung over the narrow street. The whole city felt like…a dream.

Kanda felt the sun seep through his black uniform and, slowly, into his bones, but did not feel any warmer. A brief unsteadiness blew through him, not a shudder but an instance of being dangerously untethered from reality, and Kanda felt _eyes_.

He brought himself back-he could count only one of them, and it was the Bookman Junior's, watching him in wary expectation. He was waiting for Kanda, confused that he had been standing for as long as he had and waiting for him to take the lead. But Kanda didn't-he faced him impassively, letting the features around the one wavering eye unfocus more and more, and lose their meaning the more he looked at them. Finally, the other Exorcist turned away from his scrutiny, and started hesitatingly ahead, checking back uncertainly and trying to be less aware of him at his back.

Kanda despised the idea of dying a leader. Instinctively, he did not want to be seen as he died, though the eyes would find him regardless-to be claimed by weakness from the position he seemed strongest. Beneath that-if the petal started to fall, Kanda wanted to be the first one to realize his fate, before the Bookman Junior's all-devouring attention could, and if Kanda was going to fall than he should fall behind like everyone else. Let them move on and forget him (a part of Kanda knew they wouldn't want to).

For his fall, this could well be the place-where was the line, was the question. Kanda wouldn't be able to cross that line, in a certain number of steps. There was a black taint to the white-washed town-Akuma were here, infringing slowly.

It was a sign, Kanda interpreted, that he could sense them like this. _So near_. Kanda accepted it with plain tranquility, just as he accepted that he was fooling himself with "could"-the last petal was too close, this town too alike. His time was up.

The Akuma rose like death balloons over the white blocks of the streetside buildings on both sides, and the half-humanoid Level Twos among them slithered and clawed their way from the darkness between them. But this, this was not the line. Kanda was good at fighting while he was dying.

Kanda drew out Mugen and then drew out _Mugen_ , the blue he breathed like air, like a drug, flushing through him like life-like _illusion_.

 _Destruction_ , Kanda called, and it came.

Lavi sent the first up in smoke and the sun burning red through the haze, and Kanda leaped through it to fight in a furious brilliance because he knew he wouldn't die (yet).

And then as the dust of their metal shells began to settle in flakes that burned bits of sun off of them as they twisted to the ground, Kanda realized he felt no wounds. He was untouched, or maybe that was more of the illusion.

Because where his skin was clean, Kanda could feel scars-no scars existed, but maybe if he were to open his coat he would be able to see them where they had disappeared inside of him. Kanda felt them each, but it was not pain.

For the first time, Kanda took a chance to savor them-this one that had saved a life, this one that had taught a lesson, this one that had made someone cry over him. And Kanda realized that his ice was cracking under this white, rising heat, making this dream town whiter. He could suddenly think in names again-he remembered who it was that had cried for his oldest wounds (Lenalee), who he would trust to bring the news to her when he was gone (Lavi), and who he would owe his goodbyes to (AllenTiedollMarie).

The light brightened over and around him, like focusing through a crystal, like reflection from a swinging blade, like funeral white. The dream intensified. Now, it would become real-or he would become unreal.

There was sound in Kanda's mouth, a word to make Lavi turn back, but-

He had been alone on that day. He gazed at the back of the Lavi's head for far too long. He didn't have to be alone. Maybe this didn't have to be the day. Maybe there was choice-but then what should he choose?

Small black mouths gnawed in his peripheral gaze. Kanda saw-there were flowers in the window, black-on-white and beckoning out of their pale fingers.

Kanda stopped to look at them-studying, memorizing, trying to find meaning-and felt the first of the eyes begin to land on him.

In that instant, Kanda felt as though his own eyes had just opened-as though the mission had been a dream, and he was just now waking up.

Perhaps that was the real state of things, brought about by Kanda's soul craving closure and certainty, and he would wake up in frustrated oblivion again, death stalking him from a distance he couldn't see once more. Or maybe he was in the dream so deep that he would wake up to find summer hadn't started yet, or maybe he would wake up to find that he had never been Kanda at all.

The flowers were bright, with dark centers- _anemones_ -and the reflection off the window was even brighter, white to the back of Kanda's eyes, so white, was it pain or _was it_ -?

Lenalee had said something recently-waking up in a dream of a morning far away, where she could run with light shoes and be caught up in her brother's arms and feel no guilt for either. She had spilled this out to Kanda with a palpable urgency because she could sense an ending coming. She also did it because she had always told Kanda such things, but Kanda had not come up with anything of his own to tell her. He wondered at times which ending Lenalee felt so pressed by-was it her dream of his?

Kanda was glad now he had listened while he had the chance-he didn't think Lenalee would ever bring herself to tell anyone else.

And surely, surely as the sun and moon and Allen Walker's left arm, her and his ending was caught in blackheart anemone. Now the end was behind Kanda now-he was in unheard, unknown. Lotuses couldn't live like humans did; Kanda was at peace with this.

He watched one of the petals fall; shiver first, and then drop from its cluster, from the place where it had shape and meaning-except that the petal did not belong to the anemones in the window and it was miles across the continent in a room he'd lived in his whole life.

Lavi was just ahead; Lavi was just starting to wonder _. But lotuses sleep_ _._ Will sleep _._

There was a sense of _going_ , as though Kanda himself was an hourglass and the last of his sand had just run through him, a loss or a movement, and then something like a cold shift-or maybe warm or maybe painful. Kanda thought it was cold-the cold of sun sitting on his skin and not being able to feel it.

And then everything was very, very black, or not black but simply without color, devoid or simply void, and his last moments were spent trying to grasp the single answer which had evaded him all along-was he escaping his fate, or being condemned to it?

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 **Think first uniform for this, so sometime before the Ark-the original idea for this story spawned years ago when I watched the first season of D. Gray-Man. I tried to adjust some of the key points to accommodate the reveal of Kanda's backstory (and just plain rewrote most of what was already there), while still leaving it appropriate to the time I pictured it.**

 **As with everything I write involving death, somehow my style is defaulted to abstract and detached. I wanted to experiment with a piece with no dialogue in it to express demonstratively how nothing reaches Kanda, and I also wanted to try and mimic the intensely introspective style of "Crime and Punishment" without making something monotonously written or unfeeling. It's up to you all to say whether or not I succeeded-I love Kanda as an individual character, and I find the themes of his character the most interesting out of the D. Gray-Cast.**

 **Feedback would be highly appreciated, I'm very curious about how Kanda comes across. Cheers!**


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